Empire (26 page)

“So that they will be too clever to read your son’s newspapers?”

The old lady had looked, first, severe; then she had laughed. “I had not thought of that.” Then she had proceeded to speak longingly of California, and of a university at an exotic place called Palo Alto. What her son was doing for journalism, she would do for education. Plainly, mother and son would be forever at cross-purposes.

“Mr. Hearst’s people were down here a few months ago. They looked over the plant, the books, everything. They’re still very interested.” Vardeman’s attempt at selling was perfunctory. He did not expect anyone to pay the price he was asking for what was, essentially, a run-down printer’s shop.

“Do we have,” asked Caroline tentatively, “an agreement?”

Solemnly, Vardeman extended his hand across the table. Solemnly, Caroline shook it. “The
Tribune
,” said the now former publisher, “is no longer a Wallach-Jefferson-Vardeman newspaper—after forty-two long, long years,” he added somewhat anti-climactically.

“It is now a Sanford newspaper.” Caroline felt a ringing in her ears which could be either victory, or nausea from too much cigar smoke.

Vardeman himself took her through the
Tribune
offices, in a three-story brick building with arched windows that looked out on the north side of Market Square, a curiously ill-defined, and hardly square, open area between Seventh and Ninth Streets on Pennsylvania Avenue. “A wonderful location,” said Vardeman, sincerely. “This is the heart of the commercial district, where all our advertisers are.”

“Or will be,” said Cousin John.

Caroline stood on the dirty stoop beneath the faded sign
Washington Tribune
and looked across the square, a riot of electrical and telephone wires, of turreted red brick modern buildings in the medieval style which she realized that Henry Adams, in his serenely ruthless way, was imposing on the capital city. To Caroline’s left the Center Market loomed, a combination of windowed exposition hall and Provençal cathedral, whose brick walls were the color of dried blood—Washington’s emblematic color, in which were set not stained-glass windows but dusty panes of conservatory glass. Here farmers from Virginia and Maryland brought their produce; and here in the vast interior, democracy reigned, with everyone buying and selling. Vardeman identified two banks in nearby C Street. “The one on the left held our mortgage,” he said. “But not any more.”

They entered a small waiting room, where no one waited. Dusty creaking stairs led to the offices and the newsroom, while a corridor, the length of the small building, led to the presses which were located
in a converted stables at the back. Caroline could never get enough of the actual business of printing. Rolls of paper affected her rather the way bolts of silk affected Mrs. Jack Astor, while the smell of printer’s ink gave her not only an instant headache but, equally, swift delight. In a pleasurable haze, she met her new employees. The chief printer was the money-maker; and appropriately grave. He was German; spoke with an accent; came from the Palatinate. Caroline spoke German to him; and was certain that she had won his heart. Cousin John asked to see invoices; and lost the newly gained heart.

The editorial offices overlooked Market Place. The editor was a tall Southerner, with red hair and side-whiskers. “This is Mr. Trimble, the best editor in Washington, and a Washingtonian, too. Almost as much a native as the darkies,” Vardeman added; he was prone, Caroline had noticed, to mentioning darkies rather more often than was entirely necessary. “What,” asked Caroline, “
is
a true native?”

“Oh, you’ve just got to be born here. I mean, you don’t have to be like Mr. Sanford’s Apgar relatives, who go back to the first day.” The voice was high but not unpleasant.

“Are there Washington Apgars?”

Cousin John nodded. “Apgars are everywhere. They outnumber everyone else because they marry everyone. Some of them came here in 1800, I think. They were in dry,” said Cousin John sadly, “goods.”

“My family came with General Jackson,” said Mr. Trimble. “You can always tell when us natives got here by our names. The Trimbles, like the Blairs, came with Jackson, and after we settled in, we never went home, any more than the Blairs did. Nobody goes back to Nashville if he can help it.”

“But the President—Jackson, that is—does, or did,” said Caroline, charmed by her new editor.

“Well, he couldn’t help it,” said Mr. Trimble. “What do you intend to do with the old
Trib
?”

“Why—be successful!” Caroline’s ears were now ringing again; she wondered if she was about to faint. Where once there had been four Poussins there was now a newspaper and a printer’s shop in an African city half a world away from home. Was she mad? she wondered. More important, could she win? She was certain that in the war with Blaise she had just won a significant battle if not the war itself, but Blaise was now, oddly, secondary to the newspaper, which was hers—became hers, as she sat at a rolltop desk to write out the second and final payment on her account at the Morgan Bank; and gave it to Vardeman,
who then signed the various documents that Cousin John had brought with him. The transfer was complete.

“You will see a lot of me, Mr. Trimble.” Caroline was now at the door. “I’m here for at least a year. Maybe forever.”

“Are we to continue as before?”

“Oh, yes. Nothing is to be changed, except the circulation.”

“How will you change that?” asked Vardeman, with something less than his habitual ceremony: the check in hand gave him gravity.

“Have you no murders to report?” asked Caroline.

“Well, sure. I mean, we put the police news on the last page, like always. But it’s just the usual. A body found floating in the river …”

“Surely, from time to time, a beautiful woman is pulled out of the muddy cold dark Potomac River. A beautiful young woman perhaps divided into sections, and wearing only a negligée.”

“Caroline,” murmured Cousin John, so shocked that he used, in public, her first name.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, you’re right. No negligée could survive being quartered.”

“The
Tribune
is a serious paper,” said Vardeman, thick lips suddenly compressed like punctured bicycle tires. “Devoted to the Republican Party, to the tariff …”

“Well, Mr. Trimble, let us never forget our seriousness. But let us also remember that a beautiful young woman, murdered in a crime of passion, is also a serious figure if only to herself, while the crime—murder—is the most serious of all, in peacetime, that is.”

“You want … uh,
yellow
journalism, Miss Sanford?” Trimble was staring at her, a look of amusement in his pale blue eyes.

“Yellow, ochre, café au lait,” tactlessly, she looked at yellow-brown Vardeman, “I don’t care what color. No, that’s not true. I am partial to gold.”

“What about the gold standard?” asked Cousin John, eager to make light of everything that she had said.

“As a friend of Mr. Hay, I favor that, too. Whatever,” Caroline added as graciously as she could, “it is. You see, Mr. Trimble, I am a serious woman.”

“Yes, Miss, I see that all right, and I’ll send someone over to police headquarters right now to see what they got in the morgue.”

Caroline recalled Hearst on the floor, making up the front page of the
Journal
, the murdered woman slowly coming, as it were, alive
under the embellishments. “Do that,” she said. “But remember that the illustration on the front page …”

“Front page,” groaned Vardeman, looking out at Market Square.

“… need not resemble too closely what is actually in the morgue.”

“But we … you … the
Tribune
is a newspaper,” said Vardeman.

“No,” said Caroline. “It is not a newspaper. Because there is no such thing as a newspaper. News is what we decide it is. Oh, how I love saying ‘we.’ It is a sign of perfect ignorance, isn’t it?” The ringing in her ears had stopped; she had never felt so entirely in command of herself. “Obviously earthquakes and election results and the scores of … 
baseball
teams,” she was proud to have remembered the name of the national sport, “are news, and must be duly noted. But the rest of what we print is literature, of a kind that is meant to entertain and divert and excite our readers so that they will buy the things our advertisers will want to sell them. So we must be—imaginative, Mr. Trimble.”

“I shall do my best, Miss Sanford.”

In the street Cousin John turned on her, with unfeigned anger. “You can’t be serious …”

“I have never been more serious. No.” She stopped herself. “That’s not true. What I mean to say is that I have never been serious about anything until now.”

“Caroline, this is … this is …” He launched like an anathema the word. “Corruption.”

“Corruption? Of what? The newspaper readers of Washington? Hardly. They know it all. Of the
Tribune
, a dull, dying paper? The word doesn’t apply. I see no corruption in what I mean to do. Perhaps,” she was judicious, “we shall offer a true
reflection
of the world about us. But you cannot blame a mirror for what it shows.”

“But your mirror willfully distorts …”

“A newspaper has no choice. It must be partisan in one way or another. But where is the corruption in this case?”

“An appeal to base appetites …”

“Will increase circulation. I did not make those appetites base.”

“But
that
is corrupt, to pander to them.”

“To gain readers? Surely, a small price to pay for …” Caroline stopped; a herdic cab had seen them, and now drew up to the front step.

“To pay for what?”

“To pay, Cousin John, for power. The only thing worth having in this democracy of yours.” More than a generation separated Caroline
from Henry Adams’s Mrs. Lightfoot Lee; now, Caroline decided, it was possible for a woman to achieve what she wanted on her own and not through marriage, or some similar surrogate. She had not realized to what an extent Mlle. Souvestre had given her confidence. She not only did not fear failure, she did not expect it. “Which is probably proof that I am mad,” she said to Cousin John, as he helped her down from the cab, in the dense lemon-scented shade of the twin magnolia trees.

“I don’t need any proof of that,” he said, quite ignoring the non-sequitur nature of her remark: they had been talking of Blaise and Mr. Houghteling and the ever more intricate games that were now being played at law.

Caroline led her cousin into the house, to be greeted by Marguerite with complaints about the cook, who appeared, rumbling what sounded like powerful voodoo curses against Marguerite. As usual, the crisis was based upon misunderstanding. Parisian French and Afro-American seemed always at cross-purposes. Caroline was placating the confusion of two languages, as she led Cousin John into the narrow, dim, cool drawing room that ran the length of the small house, where they sat in front of a fireplace of white marble, filled now with ceramic pots containing early roses, an innovation that had caused deep laughter in the kitchen: “Flowers is for the yard. Wood’s for the fire.”

“I wish you were more enthusiastic.” Caroline wished there was a stronger word that she could use. But their relationship was insufficiently comfortable. He seemed to think that they might yet be engaged; and she allowed him to think this on the sensible ground that as anything is possible most things are improbable. Their cousinage was also a complication. He was, above all, a Sanford; and took himself seriously,
in loco parentis
.

“You must,” said Cousin John, surprisingly, “meet
my
cousins, the Apgars. They live in Logan Circle. It’s not the West End, of course; but old Washington still prefers that neighborhood. You should have some solid friends here.”

“Unlike the Hays?” She was mischievous.

“The Hays are too grand to be of use, if you should need them, while the Apgars are always here and ready to …”

“In dry goods still?”

“One branch, yes. Apgar’s Department Store is the second largest after Woodward and Lothrop. Most are lawyers. I have told the ladies to call.”

“I’ll ask the department store Apgars to advertise in the
Tribune
.”
Caroline was serious. “The spring sales—is that what they call them?—have started.” She had become a devoted reader of advertisements.

“Well you could
ask
, I suppose.”

“Is Mr. Vardeman common?” Caroline suddenly recalled the reddish tight curls, sand-colored face.

“I should think very.”

“No, I meant is it common for mulattoes to mix with the white people?”

Cousin John was amused. “No. But he has been allowed, in many circles, to pass, and that does happen here, in certain circles. I’d be much happier if you’d settle in New York, where you belong.”

Caroline surveyed the naval mementoes on the wall opposite. A crude painting of a ship in flames, from the War of 1812, about which she knew nothing, beneath crossed sabres topped by a commodore’s hat. Under glass, a torn British ensign. “I feel as if I’ve been transported to the Roman empire,” she said. “You know, the interesting part, toward the end.”

Cousin John laughed. “We think it’s hardly begun, the United States.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” But Caroline was sure of nothing about this peculiar country except that its excessiveness appealed to her: there was far too much of everything except history. But that would come, inexorably, and she meant to be, somehow, in the mainstream of it. Suddenly, she saw history as nothing more than the Potomac River, swift yellow and swirling about dun-colored rocks that seemed to have been hurled down from the severe wooded heights of Virginia, where grew vines whose laurel-like leaves could cause human skin to erupt in itching sores. The likeness between victor’s laurel and victim’s poison ivy had not been lost upon Caroline when she had first been warned by Helen Hay as they drove out to the bronze memorial that Henry Adams had commissioned Saint-Gaudens to create, a memorial to that dead Heart, Clover Adams. Almost as symbolic of the city as the poisoned laurel was the seated, sorrowing veiled figure, with no inscription and, oddly, no agreed-upon sex: it could be a young man, or a young woman. Characteristically, Henry Adams would not say which.